Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies receives Tinker grant

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) has been awarded a prestigious grant from the Tinker Foundation to fund graduate student research in Latin America.

The two-year Tinker Field Research Grant will yield $15,000 per year in funds. Combined with a 1-for-1 match from the university, this will result in $60,000 for graduate field research in Latin America during the next two years.

The Tinker Field Research Grant program was founded in 1979 to provide support to graduate students in U.S. universities to conduct research in Latin America. When created, the stated program objectives were to promote the study of Latin America by U.S. graduate students by directly supporting research to foster contact and relationship-building between U.S. and Latin American individuals and institutions. 

The Tinker Foundation has previously awarded such grants to the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, from 1996-1998, from 2001-2004, from 2008-2011 and from 2014-2017. These Tinker awards have given graduate students at KU an opportunity to acquire a deeper knowledge of language and culture; to familiarize themselves with information sources relevant to their studies; to conduct pilot studies and preliminary investigations that will inform their dissertation proposals or theses; and to develop contacts with scholars and institutions in their fields of study.

“We are thrilled to be able to offer graduate students across the university this critical support to conduct research in Latin American countries, in a time when graduate student funding in general continues to be a challenge," said Marta Caminero-Santangelo, director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. "Tinker Field Research funds are an invaluable supplement to CLACS support for research, collaboration, language learning and institutional linkages in Latin America and the Caribbean that is made possible by our U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies funding.”

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies will begin accepting applications from graduate students for Tinker grants in early February, with a due date of March 15. Tinker recipients can come from any field of study, including public health, conservation, community development, anthropology, business, cultural studies, journalism, architecture, engineering, social welfare, the arts and education.

Project sites in the past have ranged from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean Islands, and from countries in Central America to the border regions of Mexico. Pre-dissertation doctoral students and those seeking master’s or professional degrees are eligible to apply.

For questions about the Tinker grant or the application process, please contact Aron Muci at aron.muci@ku.edu.